Nobody wins during a baseball strike

Commentary: Plus, is CNN exploiting the al-Qaida tape?

NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- If the greedy baseball players go on strike -- or get locked out by the greedy owners -- one outcome is clear: Nobody wins.

Fox is as avaricious as anyone, but in this case the television network looks like an innocent bystander. Fox
FOX, -2.26%
which has the rights to broadcast the World Series this year, would also feel an acute loss if the 2002 postseason went up in smoke.

The players' union has set an Aug. 30 strike date but said it did so as a way of prodding the owners to negotiate with a greater sense of urgency. Yeah. OK. Whatever. We've seen and heard more spin control lately than we do during a typical presidential election campaign. That means a lot of bull is flying around.

If there is a strike, the players would be even more widely hated than they are now, and they would take a financial hit. The same goes for the owners. It's truly a case of spoiled millionaires duking it out with spoiled billionaires. Or, if you prefer, vice-versa.

Of course, the fans would lose, too. (But what's new about that? Does anyone ever worry about the fans' interests, anyway?) This has been an absorbing baseball season, especially if you're a fan of Barry Bonds or Curt Schilling or Alfonso Soriano or the Braves, Yankees, Twins, Cardinals, Diamondbacks and close pennant races. The America League West features a three-team barnburner.

See, in contrast with the National Basketball Association, baseball games are exciting and fun to watch.

Impact on Fox

To you and me, the World Series is all about baseball. To Fox, it's all about business. Fox bought the rights to postseason baseball as a way to beat NBC, CBS and ABC in the game that matters most to TV networks: the ratings game.

In addition, Fox is desperately counting on the World Series, perennially one of the most glittering TV properties in any year, to help promote its fall lineup. Remember, Fox was the New York Mets of TV networks last year and could certainly use the PR boost.

A Fox Sports spokesman said this week that the network was poised to hand its programming over to its entertainment division in case a strike disrupts its plans. But, aside from that, he offered no details about Fox's contingency plans.

'You take a key sports element out of the [Fox] equation, and it's like taking "Friends" away from NBC's "must-see" Thursday lineup. Fox will suffer.'
Robert Thompson, Syracuse University

"A strike would really hurt Fox's efforts to roll out its fall lineup," said Robert Thompson, a television industry professor at Syracuse University.

"Fox uses the baseball postseason -- especially the World Series -- as a delivery system and a lead-in to its new programs," Thompson said. "All of a sudden, you take a key sports element out of the equation, and it's like taking 'Friends' away from NBC's 'must-see' Thursday lineup. Fox will suffer."

Years ago, many observers regarded Fox as something of a quirky, downtrodden network -- until it obtained the rights to broadcast National Football League games in the mid-1990s.

Fox got a big boost in terms of respectability from airing games featuring such National Football Conference teams as the New York Giants, the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers.

Even if Fox's programming strategy goes awry, the company has some prospects. According to the Hollywood Reporter, if a strike occurs, Major League Baseball would owe Fox "at least $500 million. [Sources] said Fox could ascribe $300 million -- 88 percent of each year's payments -- to postseason games." The postseason is usually when the network earns the lion's share of its baseball-season profits.

Plus, the World Series broadcasts would provide a seamless lead-in to the Fox Sports Network's freewheeling sports talk show, "The Best Damned Sports Show, Period," starring Tom Arnold.

Baseball last had a strike in 1994. It wiped out the last portion of that year's regular season. That strike also accomplished something that even terrorists couldn't do: It canceled the World Series.

The sport's image suffered in the aftermath of the 1994 strike. Eventually, baseball fans were energized in 1996 when Cal Ripken Jr. broke Lou Gehrig's consecutive-game record by playing in his 2,131st consecutive game. Then, in 1998, both Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa surpassed Roger Maris' 37-year-old single-season home run record.

"Now, there are so many records being broken fairly routinely," Syracuse University's Thompson said. "It's pretty clear that a strike would drive away a lot of baseball fans. It's hard to say what would have to happen on the field to bring them back."

Did CNN go too far?

CNN scored a big win this week when it aired a tape of Osama bin Laden's forces in training. But the network may have blown its victory by showing the footage so much and in so many ways that, to some, it appeared as if the broadcast had been trivialized as entertainment.

(CBS also showed the tapes; CBS is a unit of Viacom, a significant investor in MarketWatch.com, the publisher of this report)

CNN practically showed a threat to U.S. national security as overhyped episodes of a new show called "Terror on Tape."

CNN, a unit of AOL Time Warner
AOL
needs to look in the mirror. Its executives have long said that their network stands above the fray, especially compared with rival Fox.

Fox has been accused of exploiting the news by re-packaging it as some sort of Shock TV. Plus its commentators and their guests are famously loud in offering their opinions -- which seem to support a politically conservative point of view.

"We used to have 'The Missing Honeymooners' Episodes,' and now we'll have 'The Missing al-Qaida Tapes,' " quipped Thompson. "CNN is scrambling for ratings.

Showing the tape makes sense, he said, but the way CNN aired it was not unlike "a video in heavy rotation on MTV."

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